Time tracking for multi-media/multi-modal communications in high-paced professional environments, such as law, accounting, and medicine, can vary between being haphazard based on the user's best recollection of events to a laborious process using a number of disjointed applications. In the case of the former, significant inaccuracy and lost revenue generation potential can be the result. In the case of the latter, the use of the different applications is disruptive to the normal flow of business and, due to the process overhead, reduces the time available to actually generate revenue from value-added activities. One weakness in all prior art is a failure to consider the complexities of multi-media/modal communications and related Internet and paid provider search sessions Examples of paid provider search sessions include LexisNexis™, Westlaw™, and Delphion™, each of which offers a searchable archive of content from newspapers, magazines, legal documents and other printed public sources. Such search sessions are contextually related to a customer matter and are therefore revenue generating.
In designing an automatic logging system, there are a number of considerations. It should be a versatile and intelligent method of logging any and all communications, whether voice-, text-, and/or video-enabled, and searches, without incurring significant overhead, to provide accurate billing results. It should be done so that the user does not have to be resident, physically or logically, in the enterprise premises, on the enterprise network, or otherwise using a device that is dedicated to the business of the enterprise. It should maintain accurate timing information by identifying intelligently and accurately starting and stopping points for the service being monitored.